UK to Papua New Guinea: 15 months in

The plan was to make my way from the UK to Papua New Guinea (PNG) without the use of flights. I expected it to take a year, maybe a year and a half.

I left England and hitchhiked across Europe, crashing out in gardens and fields, sleeping in my tent, on couches and sometimes in a nice warm bed. It was freezing and I saw only a few other backpackers, this was the absolute height of the low-season.

I was earning a relatively easy passive income of about $1000 a month from my blog (it took me about a year to get to this point) which meant that whenever I wanted a beer, I had nothing to worry about. I knew some bloggers were making six figures but I was perfectly content. My travel costs were pretty low which meant that most months I was actually saving money whilst travelling the world.

Livin’ the dream.

I sped across Europe, hitchhiking through France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia and Croatia. In Croatia, I scored a car and spent a month exploring Bosnia, Montenegro, Serbia, Kosovo, Albania (hand’s down – the highlight!) and Macedonia. I finally made my way to Bulgaria, before crossing to Turkey.

I spent a totally weird New Year’s Eve blasted out of my brain in some ancient Greek ruins with my brother Alex and we chatted about what the hell I wanted out of this adventure. I realised I really didn’t know, I just wanted to escape, I was looking for something and Papua New Guinea was extremely far away… It gave me time to figure out what the heck I was going to do.

Me and Alex headed up to Cappadocia where we spent an awesome week living in a cave and soaking in stunning views of snow-topped fairy chimneys.

That doorway leads to an incredible manmade cave.

Alex had to leave and I pushed on, hitchhiking through Southern Turkey to Tbilisi in Georgia where I spent a very drunken 27th birthday with a bunch of locals I met in a bar. Broke and hungover, I hitched onwards through knee-deep snow to Iran.

Iran was to be a country that would have a deep effect on my journey. I met a Persian girl, Esme, and we hitchhiked 3000km across Iran, getting a temporary Islamic marriage after a couple of days so the police would leave us be.

Hitting the road in Iran

We camped out on an incredible multicoloured island and I wrestled with the decision of what to do next – Should I forget about Esme or see if we could travel further together?

My incredible family and me and Sitara sharing a lunch of Goat cheese, bread and apricots on a glacier.

Pakistan turned out to be my favourite country by far – this is a land of towering peaks, endless hospitality and untouched adventures. On my last night, before crossing the border to India, I went to an underground rave on the outskirts of Lahore. It was mental.

I met Alex again in India and together we undertook our most challenging bro-venture to date; driving a piece of shit, but very pretty looking, rickshaw across a subcontinent.

Alex eventually left and I spent some time bumbling around in the Indian Himalayas before giving Esme a call. We chatted and I explained the situation – If she was down to travel cheap, to hitchhike and camp, to visit offbeat places – then she should get on the next flight to India.

Esme arrived and we drove Tinkerbell into the mountains until she finally broke down beyond repair and we had to continue on foot.

India has changed. I first came here when I was 19, I spent a year and a half exploring this massive country with no phone. There was no wi-fi, no hostels, no real backpacker circuit. Today, India is definitely a little bit easier and that’s a good thing… The hostels that are popping up make it easier to tap into the backpacking vibe and meet cool people. It was an odd feeling to be back in a country which had affected me in ways beyond counting. Nine years ago, travelling in India for the firs time was the beginning of a very new chapter in my life.

My Favourite Place in India

Me and Esme spent a month in the mountains working on improving the blog and planning out some other online ventures before getting ready to go to Nepal where we planned to cross to Bhutan.

In the eleventh hour, the Bhutanese company who was sponsoring our visas (Bhutanese visas are $270 a day so well out of my price range!) backed out.

Esme’s Indian visa was close to expiry – it’s a bitch to sort visas for Iranians – so we did a U-turn and headed back to the best mountain scenery in the world; Pakistan.

We camped out on the Deosai Plain, the second highest plain in the world. The stars started on the horizon, I have never seen anything like it, camping out on Deosai is like being inside a giant snow-globe. In the night, our tent was approached by four large bears, luckily the Pakistani army unit across the river came to our rescue and rushed our tent brandishing burning branches, it was quite a sight to behold.

A much more chilled view a few hours before we were visited by the bears.

We headed back to Hunza and spent time again with Rehman and his family. Totally broke and in need of some cash to keep the adventure going, I announced my plans to run an adventure tour and produced a promo video to help sell the slots.

The tour sold out in five days and I was over the moon – in September I will be leading twelve awesome backpackers, along with Alex, deep into the Pakistani mountains for a trekking trip like no other.

Me and Esme in Pakistan

It was at this point that Esme’s Mum, pretty concerned that Esme had dropped out of her dental degree in the last year to run off with a foreigner, demanded that Esme returns to Iran and that I tag along for inspection.

We flew back to Iran and I met the family.

A picnic in Northern Iran

Esme’s family were incredibly welcoming and very liberal, I finished off their small collection of wine pretty quickly and spent many chilled evenings enjoying a cheeky smoke with Esme and her sister.

Our one month temporary marriage had long expired and so, partly to keep Esme’s family happy, partly to make visas easier and partly because we wanted to, we arranged to have another wedding – a big fat Persian wedding.

I converted to Islam, for legal not spiritual reasons, and took the Shia name, Reza.

Will Reza Hatton

Rockin’ out at our wedding

We spent a few weeks exploring Iran and hanging out with Esme’s family before my visa was up and it was time once more to hit the road.

I had at this point been getting a lot of messages from followers who wanted to know – how could I afford to travel?

My travel blog was, in August 2016, making between $1500 and $2500 a month but it was inconsistent and we were usually spending more than we were earning. I racked up a credit card bill so that I could afford to pay my team and grow the business. Making money from a travel blog is not easy, the market is saturated and immature and therefore extremely vulnerable to manipulation by low-balling clients.

But you can work in places like this…

I found myself increasingly chained to my laptop as I struggled to make enough money out of the blog to fund everything and had to spend more and more time hustling online. I decided that this has to change if I am to get the best experience out of the actual travelling – which was the point of starting the blog in the first place.

In 2017, my objective is to experiment with different ways of making money online that are totally unrelated to travel blogging; I’ll be launching a drop-shipping venture and setting up a few amazon niche websites. I hope to hit a combined income of $10,000 a month by December 2017.

I’ll be blogging about the whole experience with complete transparency – whether it’s a massive success or a pitiful failure.

The objective here (besides hoping to make a load of money) is to do a series of experiments into different digital nomad professions and provide you guys with a blueprint so that you too can ditch your desks and travel the world whilst earning a passive income.

To find out more about the ‘ditch your desk’ experiment, sign up to the newsletter below.

From Iran, we headed to Thailand to spend three months working our asses off and getting fit again (thank Allah for Crossfit!). Whilst in Thailand, I finally started working on my book – How to Travel the World on $10 a Day.

I was truly unsure at this point what to do about UK to PNG; officially, I had made it as far as Central India before turning around again in a mad-squiggle to Iran.

This map only shows some of the places I went. I spent 7 months doing this part of the trip.

For New Years Eve 2016, I headed to Myanmar with Alex and Esme; we spent a happy few days off-roading around the temples of Bagan and finally found what we were looking for.

We spent a magical night camped out on an isolated temple, surrounded by fireworks, the occasional gong and Buddhist chanting drifting upon the wind. Nobody knew we were there and there was nobody around for at least a mile. It was an amazing, deeply moving, experience.

The sun came up, illuminating the truly splendid temples upon the first day of 2017.

We returned to Thailand and got stuck into another month of hardcore work, starting work on two new sites and preparing to launch a drop-shipping business in March.

My plan is to pick up UK to PNG where I left off. To travel from India via motorbike to Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam – from here, I will attempt to build a boat and sail to Papua New Guinea via Indonesia.

The flag is where we will continue the overlanding adventure from.

But when? We are heading to Bhutan (we found a new sponsor) at the end of March 2017 for seventeen days (including an eleven day trek!) of adventure awesomeness…

After Bhutan, we are going to head back to Iran and then pop back to the UK (for a third wedding my parents want to throw) before returning to Pakistan for some top-secret gallivanting in remote corners of the country.

I’ll be in Pakistan for a while, maybe three months, as I’ll also be leading the adventure tour.

Stunning Pakistan

After Pakistan, I will probably take three months out to work my ass off online before hitting the road again properly and continuing UK to PNG.

But first, I need to change my position – I need to build a business online that can be run with just five hours input a week. A business which will be largely passive, which will enable me to travel and to focus on the travelling itself.

I predict my total monthly costs at roughly 5k.

Travel and living expenses for two people: 2k a month

Business running costs and staff: 3k a month

I want to build my online business to a point where I have a passive income of 10k a month. This is the magic number.

This will let me save 5k a month which I will put towards buying some land and opening a truly unique (off the grid and away from the internet) hostel somewhere in South America in a couple of years time.

Yay for no phone signal!

When I first hit the road, nine years ago, I didn’t have a phone. I travelled solo and jumped in an internet cafe maybe once every two months. It was an incredible way to travel and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

This is how I want to travel – without any commitment to my inbox.

I often manage to unplug for three to six weeks, when I’m in countries like Pakistan it’s almost impossible to do any work anyway, but to unplug for twelve months (which is how long I think it will take to complete the journey to PNG) is simply not an option at the moment.

Most months now we bring in an online income of about 5k but my costs are so high as I am investing heavily at the moment and we are always, literally, broke.

Last week, I had $6 in my PayPal account and about $2000 in bills I needed to pay.

I have no savings, no back-up and no desire to work for anybody else, so to make this travel dream a reality I need to build a passive online income that I can manage with just five hours work a week.

That’s the plan.

I am very excited for 2017, it is going to be a year filled with extremely sharp learning curves, unique opportunities and epic adventures and hopefully, at the end of this year, I can resume UK to PNG properly and do it the way it is meant to be done.

As always, thank you for your incredible support! If you want to learn how to ditch your desk, hit the road and travel on a budget of just $10 a day, check out The Backpacker Bible – This is everything I’ve learnt over the last nine years of backpacking – actionable advice on planning, safety, making friends, cutting your costs to almost zero, picking up work, getting off the beaten track, setting up an online income and getting the absolute most out of your adventures… Check it out here.

Writer and hustler. Adventurer and vagabond. Master of the handstand pushup. Conqueror of mountains, survivor of deserts and crusader for cheap escapades. Will has been on the road for nine years, travelling to far-flung lands on a budget. Today, he runs a number of online ventures. He is passionate about teaching others how to ditch their desks, hit the road and achieve real freedom by earning money online. Currently, Will is on a four year journey from the UK to Papua New Guinea; travelling through truly special countries such as Iran, Pakistan and Bhutan whilst running his businesses online.

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14 Comments

Such a great read, Will! Bumped into you last year while we were at the Lake View Garden Restaurant in Bundi – we were on our way to Nepal the next day and you were waxing lyrical about Pakistan being twice as good. Maybe we’ll get there one day. Have a great 2017 and hope things work out as planned for you!

A fantastic read as ever Will, seems your plans 18 months on are still on track, keep us updated on your latest trails, maybe bump into you in Indonesia if your that way come April/May.
Best of luckBrez recently posted…Lost City of Z

Hey Will! What an amazing journey you are on. I loved reading this post and can’t wait to keep up with all of your new ventures. Best of luck for the future! If you are ever in south China give me a shout! My husband and I host people from couchsurfing and warmshowers pretty regularly and we’d love to have you stay 🙂

Totally agree with you about travelling and being tied to the internet, it’s a totally different experience when you’re not connected, for the better! As I am trying to grow my blog I find myself spending more time on the laptop than I’d like, and have recently given myself set hours to do related admin, because otherwise it can take over and take the fun and adventure out of travel! Passive income is the dream for me too, good luck with it, please let us know how it goes, I look forward to reading your tips!John R recently posted…My Continental Cycle Trip: Living With Eyes Open

Great to hear all of your travel plans and ideas of building up your business! I’m trying to do something similar so I can go on a one month trip around India. I’m hoping to do your Pakistan adventure tour this year if it’s offered again!

And your ‘smart person’ would miss out on Iran, Pakistan, India and Myanmar – the highlights of my trip so far. This isn’t a race man – it isn’t about getting there as fast as possible, if I wanted to do that, I’d fly.

How amazing journey yeaah, without an air plain from UK to PNG with time more than 1 year. That so funtastic can hit in many country in Europe and Asian, of course you can get many experience because that. Your traveling is different with the others, it’s so interesting right. Many country that you visit in, the one of them is Indonesia. When you arrive in Indonesia, what do you think about Indonesia ? are you know about Komodo island, that place is so amazing you can found Komodo the ancient animal who still survive until now. If you want to visit in Komodo island, don’t worry about the accomodation, here i have information about resort and hotel near komodo island, you can visit http://www.komodoresort.com/ to get more information about that. See you at Komodo island .